Dystopian Hegmony

Ullr! To you I do give thanks for your blessings and protection Through the times of chill and gale.

Freyja! To you I do give thanks for your blessings and healing When I am faint and pale.

Odin! To you I do give thanks for your blessings and guidance When I am ignorant and lost.

Skadhi! To you I do give thanks for your blessings and vengeance When I am pained or crossed. Tyr! To you I do give thanks for your blessings and sacrifice Through times of menace and uncertainty. Bragi! To you I do give thanks for your blessings and elocution Through times of romance and diplomacy. Freyr! To you I do give thanks for your blessings and lust Through times of romance and devotion. Thor! To you I do give thanks for your blessings and strength When I am challenged and broken. Idunn! To you I do give thanks for your blessings and vigor When I am dismal and fatigued.

amrit brar | musterni - 2016

In 1990 Dr. Rick Strassman initiated the first psychedelic drug research involving human volunteers to take place in the United States in over 20 years. During this research a total of 60 human volunteers received around 400 doses of DMT at the University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine in Albuquerque. Dr. Strassman published the results of these trials in his famed book DMT The Spirit Molecule which offers theories as to the effect of DMT in the human body, as well as the extreme altered states of consciousness that the volunteers were launched into upon administration.

HYBYCOZO, or the Hyperspace Bypass Construction Zone, is a series of sublime, laser cut cosmic objects, ranging from a Burning Man art installation to design pieces for the home.

The project is inspired by the intersection of science, technology, maker culture in the Bay Area, and of course, the artists’ favorite book, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. HYBYCOZO was designed by 2 San Francisco artists who are hoping to take their passion for design, technology, geometry, and installation art to the next level and expand it into thought provoking art and design.

Serge Beaulieu is an industrial designer whom recently led design at Fuseproject designing tech hardware, housewares, furniture and more. After doing stints at multiple design agencies, Serge is embarking on personal art and design ventures. Design/Lighting/Cozo

SCIENTISTS JUST CONFIRMED THAT WE FOUND GRAVITATIONAL WAVES!

Pictures from The Resurrectionistby E.B. Hudspeth.

For the purposes of this post, I’m focusing on the D&D style nagas pictured at the top. 

Sometimes beautiful, sometimes monstrous, usually magical and found in secluded places, naga’s are always dangerous. But today I want to talk about what they do, how and why. 

Facebook’s Psychological Experiments Connected to Department of Defense Research on Civil Unrest

It turns out that one of the researchers who ran Facebook’s recent psychological experiments received funding from the U.S. Department of Defense to study the contagion of ideas

July 1 2014

There has been quite a bit of chatter this past week after it was revealed that a recent Facebook outage was the result of a psychological experiment that the company conducted on a portion of its users without their permission. The experiment, which was described in a paper published by Facebook, and UCSF, tested the contagion of emotions on social media by manipulating the content of personal feeds and measuring how this impacted user behavior.

Over 600,000 users were used as guinea pigs without their consent, which raises a number of serious ethical and legal questions (particularly due to the fact that this study received federal funding), however there is an even more disturbing angle to this story. It turns out that this research was connected to a Department of Defense project called the Minerva Initiative, which funds universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world.

In the official credits for the study conducted by Facebook you’ll find Jeffrey T. Hancock from Cornell University. If you go to the Minerva initiative website you’ll find that Jeffery Hancock received funding from the Department of Defense for a study called “Cornell: Modeling Discourse and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes”. If you go to the project site for that study you’ll find a visualization program that models the spread of beliefs and disease.

Cornell University is currently being funded for another DoD study right now called “Cornell: Tracking Critical-Mass Outbreaks in Social Contagions” (you’ll find the description for this project on the Minerva Initiative’s funding page).

The Department of Defense’s investment in the mechanics of psychological contagion and Facebook’s assistance, have some very serious implications, particularly when placed in context with other scandals which have broken in the past two years.

First of all we know that Facebook willingly participated (and presumably is still participating) in the NSA’s PRISM program by giving the agency unfettered access to user communications. We also know that the U.S. government has invested heavily in technology used to track and model the spread of opinions on social media.

The U.S. government hasn’t sought these capabilities for the sake of science. We know from the Cuban Twitter scandal, where the U.S. State Department where got caught red handed attempting to topple the Cuban government through social media, that these capabilities are already being used for offensive operations. Combine that with the fact that the U.S. Military got exposed in 2011 for developing ‘sock puppet’ software to create fake online identities and spread propaganda and an ominous picture snaps into focus.

The U.S. government is militarizing social media through a combination of technology and social sciences, and Facebook is helping them.

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Editor’s note: Here’s a Guardian report from a few weeks ago about this Department of Defense research project